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Abstract
How does trauma influence a client and a therapist’s experience of time in time-limited therapy? The therapist must first work to understand and remain responsive to the different registers of time now operative following the traumatic event. This paper contends that in the immediacy of trauma, hallucinatory wish-fulfilment oblivious to the structuring conditions of time and space appears to dominate. In chronic traumatic states, time appears to circle in a narrow compass, buffering between a cluster of moments surrounding and including the moment of traumatic rupture – as if struggling to re-establish a secure connection with linear time. The three clinical fragments presented attempt to describe different experiences of traumatic bereavement and the felt movement of time within them. The death of another confronts us not only with their loss but with our own mortality – the time we have lived and the time we have left. It is not surprising, therefore, that an individual's otherwise fluid transitions between different temporalities are disturbed in the aftermath of traumatic bereavement. The therapist’s capacity to regulate tempo when the client’s subjective experience of time is dysregulated offers an important means of containment. The aim of the therapist working with the traumatically bereaved client is to develop collaborative understanding to get thinking moving again and to gradually help the client unpin time, moving it beyond the confines that it occupies in trauma.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. It is important to distinguish traumatic bereavement from pathological mourning. In states of pathological mourning, grief and the sense of emptiness at loss of the external object are magnified. They are compounded by the bereaved person’s sense that the internal good object has been lost forever, destroyed in fantasy by their aggression (Kernberg et al., Citation1989, p. 139). Such states may prove more recalcitrant to treatment. In traumatic bereavement, the relationship with the good internal object is felt to be lost though not necessarily unrecoverable. The prognosis is consequently more positive. Nonetheless, in some cases, the sense of injustice felt by the traumatically bereaved individual can lead to deepening grievance, envy at the perceived relative good fortune of others, despair and cynicism towards an external world experienced as unfair and cruel.
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Roger Lippin
Roger Lippin worked for a number of years as a social work practitioner and supervisor in local authority Children and Families Services. He later completed his training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at The Guild of Psychotherapists in London. Roger currently works as a therapist and supervisor in a University Counselling Service composed of therapists and counsellors from different modalities who work collaboratively.